The past three weeks have really angered me. Most, if not all the good faith I have had towards the people that run this University has been lost. Why? Disrespect. It has become glaringly clear to me that the administration (specific names to follow) does not think Duke students are very intelligent and does not really care what we think about how Duke should be, despite the fact that we live here and they do not. Keep this in mind.
We live in the dorms, we park in the Blue Zone and we eat in The Marketplace. They do not. Students and administrators can still have reasonable and constructive discourse on student life issues, but we need to acknowledge that students are the experts.
First, East Campus Council passed a resolution seeking to remedy a problem that both the Administration and Duke students have known for quite some time: the freshman meal plan. It is a farce and completely unsatisfactory.
No one eats breakfast. You think Jim Wulforst, head of dining, doesn't know this?
The Marketplace has been empty for breakfast for years. Everyone knows the plan is unfair. Jim's response to the resolution was basically, "I'll think about it." What else do you need to hear, Jim? There are 6,000 students willing to tell you right now that freshmen should have more food points and should not have to eat five breakfasts a week on the plan.
Everyone thinks it's unfair. Jim, you need to listen to us. Here's an idea: if you need the money so much, replace mandatory breakfasts with food points and put Friday and Saturday night dinners on the meal plan. Freshmen don't want to eat off-campus or on West every Friday and Saturday night, so this is a healthy compromise.
This past week, Parking and Transportation Services used the Blue Zone for the Campaign for Duke party.
Instead of informing the student body ahead of time via the University's official medium for mass communication--e-mail--they put up a small sign in the back of the Blue Zone and let people leave the parking lot but not return.
Anyone that left and needed to get back in was screwed. Why would they do this? Because if they e-mailed us ahead of time they knew we would be pissed off and would respond in mass.
Parking and Transportation Services is the epitome of the administration's apathy and disrespect toward students. I would tell them to listen to the student body, but DSG has not been vociferously complaining as they should be.
There's no one to listen to.
A few days later, Eddie Hull, head of Residential Life and Housing Services (which runs practically everything having to do with dorms, including who gets to live in them) suspended annual review for the semester, rejecting Campus Council's unanimous resolution for a completely revamped annual review that would have pumped some life into West Campus and released selective living groups from doing mundane tasks that give nothing to their neighbors. Eddie has a thorough rationale that calls into question the role of annual review and the role of selective living groups that he tried to respectfully share with Duke students.
The Chronicle, unfortunately, has done a poor job of putting his decision in the context of the past few years. For the past couple of years, Campus Council has been strung along with tidbits of information of how Eddie and his boss, Larry (we all know Larry), want residential life to look like.
We have been given just enough information so that they can claim that we are involved, when in reality we're just being used as a public display that the administration cares what we think when they clearly do not.
I'll tell you what I do know. Over the past two years RLHS has made life for selective living groups as uncomfortable as possible without revealing their agenda. For example, I talked to an RA this week for an hour who told me that his RC (boss) told him that he should be writing up more selective living group members in his section. Apparently, the assumption was that if students weren't being written up it was because they weren't being caught, not because they weren't doing anything wrong. Think about that for a second and you'll realize how ridiculous the bias against selective living groups is. The RA was encouraged to write people up without warnings if there was a mere suspicion that rules were being broken, following the rationale that it is second semester and students should know better.
What is their agenda? What is the quad model? We don't know. Yet we live with the consequences of their decisions. Eddie regrets that he did not keep us more informed about his annual review decision. Last semester, I would have believed that. Now, I don't buy it. This is just another example of administrators not listening to students. Another rendition of: "That's cute, but let the experts handle it."
They work here. We live here. It is absolutely imperative that the administration--Larry and his employees--listens to us and accommodates us.
And they're not going to do that until student leaders are more forceful with their complaints and are less submissive to weak, unsubstantiated arguments that the administration puts forth.
The premier example: there's a widespread philosophy that if the student body doesn't like a policy or change, in four years they'll come around to it and embrace it. A "change of culture" will happen. Because everyone who knows better will be gone.
Why aren't they listening to students? Because they believe students aren't making them. They think Duke students are apathetic. Well, you know what? They just awoke a sleeping giant. And we're not graduating just yet.
Pasha Majdi is a Trinity junior and a member of Campus Council. His opinions do not represent the views of Campus Council.
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